The Arts

The Jockey and the Showman

Jockey, bon vivant, and art collector Billy Pearson in his infamous “speak no evil” pose with two of the three Veracruz fakes.

In a long and colorful life, jockey turned art dealer Billy Pearson earned a reputation as a great raconteur, trading laughs with pals such as Gene Kelly, Andy Williams, and Sam Shepard. But Pearson may have pulled the ultimate prank on his best friend, John Huston, in a storyline straight out of The Maltese Falcon.

The first thing that jockey Billy Pearson did with his winning check from The $64,000 Question was walk into Manhattan’s Knoedler gallery and buy Edward Hicks’s painting Peaceable Kingdom for close to $5,000. Pearson had spent the previous night in April 1956 celebrating at artist Misha Reznikoff’s apartment, a converted carriage house on East 69th Street. The party featured three bands, including Eddie Condon’s own from his eponymous nightclub, a dozen singers, and assorted showgirls and hangers-on. At one point in the evening, Burl Ives, just a year removed from his breakthrough role in Elia Kazan’s East of Eden, approached Pearson with the $64,000 check. Fearing it would be lost in the tumult, the two men hid it in the ice-cube tray of Reznikoff’s freezer.

M.C. Hal March reads a question to Pearson on the set of The $64,000 Question, 1956. From CBS/Getty Images.

During the course of the celebration, a transatlantic call of congratulations came in from director John Huston. “How did you find out so soon?” Pearson asked. “I had my secretary in New York call me in London and keep the circuit open on the phone until the show went on the air,” replied Huston. At a cost of more than $400, his secretary turned up the volume on her television and placed the phone receiver nearby. “I heard the whole half-hour show,” roared Huston to his friend.

When Pearson went to collect his winnings at the end of the party, he found that a splash of water had been deposited into the tray—the check now lay wedged in ice. “They couldn’t thaw it out, because the writing would have melted,” novelist Barnaby Conrad recalls. “They went down to the Chase National Bank with the ice tray and asked to see the manager.” According to the late newspaper columnist Art Buchwald, Pearson insisted that he be given the money in cash. Playwright and actor Sam Shepard picks up the story: “They didn’t know what to do with the cash, [which] they’re carrying around in the street. So Ives has this great idea. He’ll go and buy a top hat, and put the money in the hat and wear it. So they’re going down the street, with Burl Ives wearing this top hat with $64,000 in cash inside of it.” Says Conrad, “[Billy and Ives] got drunk and they went up and down Fifth Avenue giving out $10 bills to strangers, just forking them over.”

When Pearson finally arrived at the Knoedler gallery, he bought the iconic Hicks painting. “If you are a collector, and you have an opportunity to buy one of these,” says David Schorsch, the dealer who handled the sale of much of Pearson’s Americana collection, “you bite that apple. And here it was. It was in front of him, it was for sale, and it was a charmer.”

No less a charmer was Billy Pearson, who began his transition from jockey to art connoisseur one decade earlier when he picked up a book on antiques while recuperating in the hospital from life-threatening racing injuries. A notorious raconteur, Pearson, who died in 2002 at the age of 82, told his quiz-show check story again and again over the years, and it acquired a brighter sheen with each new narration. The episode achieved a larger-than-life quality that mirrored the larger-than-life man. Indeed, so fantastic are the details of Billy Pearson’s biography that one can be forgiven in forgetting that he stood a mere five feet two inches from head to toe.

On the way to establishing himself as a prominent dealer, Pearson befriended a group of cultural figures as varied as the art he collected, from artists Miguel Covarrubias and Diego Rivera to Hollywood icons John Huston and Gene Kelly, to the singer Andy Williams. He rode horses for kings and presidents and ran with a fast San Francisco crowd that included Hungry i–club founder Enrico Banducci, Pulitzer Prize–winning gossip columnist Herb Caen, and Sam Shepard, who dedicated his play Fool for Love to the six-times-married Pearson in 1983. With a deep curiosity for decorative objects and an insatiable need to be the center of attention, Pearson led a freewheeling life of gambling, smoking, and drinking that left friends and family amazed that he made it into his ninth decade.

Daring, Cock-Brained, and Foolish

Billy Pearson grew up in Los Angeles in the 1920s, when the city was still little more than a desert town filled with dreamers. He was raised by his single mother, Ann, a nurse who worked the night shift. But it was his grandfather who became the boy’s early role model, regaling him with stories of his own grandfather’s gold-rush adventures, while educating Pearson in the subjects of gambling and women. The most practical gift that the teenage Pearson received from his grandfather was a contact at a local stable. Having been kicked out of both high school and the New Deal–sponsored Civilian Conservation Corps—with a stint at a reform school in between—Billy, with his size-4 feet, jumped at the opportunity.

Pearson weighs in. From Never Look Back.

Pearson quickly moved up the ranks. After exercising horses for Hollywood mogul Harry Warner, he finally got his opportunity as a jockey. While an apprentice rider, Pearson followed the race “meetings”—one- to two-month stretches during which the West Coast racers would congregate at a given track from San Diego to San Francisco.

“No one was riding more daring, more cock-brained, or more foolish” than Pearson, or so he declared in his 1958 memoir, Never Look Back. It was a style employed to compete with stronger riders, but mischief was, and would always be, an essential ingredient of Pearson’s character. An inveterate practical joker, he “kept the jocks’ room in stitches,” recalls one jockey who rode with Pearson for several years on the California circuit. “He was always on.”

Children of the Depression, Pearson and many of his fellow jockeys were unprepared for the salaries they were making. They spent extravagantly on cars, prostitutes, and just about any bet they could conjure up. By 1941, money was not an issue for Pearson. He was ranked 27th in the country and raked in $114,110 in prize money (equivalent to approximately $1.6 million today) racing alongside the day’s top riders. But Pearson’s career took a drastic turn one day at the Hollywood Park racetrack when he was knocked off his saddle and trapped beneath five horses. He lay in the hospital for nearly six months with a shattered collarbone and shoulder. Unsuited to the bedridden life, he kept several bottles of booze nearby and encouraged nurses to stop by for a smoke or a drink. The hospital staff began to call his room “the Den of Iniquity.” When the nurses were gone, Pearson picked up some books on antiques he had purchased years earlier, influenced by his mother’s amateur but passionate interest in decorative objects. The books sparked an epiphany. Until then, he later recalled, he “had been looking at only a small part of the universe.”

After leaving the hospital, Pearson was asked to evaluate a two-year-old colt recently bought by Millard Sheets, an innovative California watercolorist who had briefly shared studio space with Henri Matisse in Paris. Pearson and Sheets hit it off and the painter nurtured Billy’s budding interest in collecting art. Most significantly, Sheets introduced Pearson to Earl Stendhal, an important dealer of early-modern art and widely considered the first major American dealer in the nascent pre-Columbian trade. Stendhal’s growing sales of pre-Columbian sculpture reflected the fascination with primitive art sparked by the Cubist movement, which had been embraced by Hollywood collectors like Edward G. Robinson, Kirk Douglas, and Gene Kelly.

With American racetracks closed during World War II, Pearson headed down to Baja, Mexico, after a stint in the merchant marine. At nearby Rosarito Beach, he met Queta Cabanillas, a 26-year-old Mexican beauty. Briefly married twice before, Pearson fell hard for Queta, and in 1945 she became his third wife. She persuaded him to consider riding in her native Mexico. After accepting a job offer from a friend who was training horses for Mexican president Manuel Ávila Camacho, Pearson quickly developed a solid reputation as one of the country’s leading jockeys.

Through an artist friend, Pearson was also introduced to Diego Rivera and the caricaturist Miguel Covarrubias, both avid collectors of pre-Columbian art. When he wasn’t racing, he hired men to hunt for objects in the Indian villages of Mexico. What Pearson didn’t like he would trade, often to Covarrubias and Rivera. By the time Pearson left Mexico in 1946, he had acquired, as he put it, “four thousand pounds of national treasure,” smuggled out in exchange for a can of chili peppers at the Mexican border.

Attended by a nurse, Pearson watches the final race of the season from a stretcher at Hollywood Park, Inglewood, California, on July 26, 1941. From A.P. Photos.

Don Quixote & Sancho Panza

Billy Pearson first met John Huston at Santa Anita racetrack, in Los Angeles, in 1947. He had heard of Huston’s impressive pre-Columbian art collection, which was allegedly enhanced when the director smuggled several pieces onto a movie sound truck after filming The Treasure of the Sierra Madre in Mexico the previous year. “I hear you made a catch,” said Pearson to the director, who towered over him by a foot. “Why don’t you come on over to my house and see what I’ve brought back,” offered Huston. Pearson soon found himself in Huston’s Tarzana home, surrounded by Modiglianis, Klees, and an assortment of Mexican tomb figures.

Coincidentally, Huston owned a disagreeable horse named Bargain Lass, who had been driving one jockey after another nuts trying to get her into the starting gate. Pearson suggested to Huston that he give him a chance to ride the horse in exchange for payment in pre-Columbian art. “You’re faded, kid,” replied Huston with a smirk, adding that he would throw in doctors’ bills and surgical work should Pearson get thrown by the troublemaker filly. “Just keep the Mexican art handy,” said Pearson.

Shortly after shaking hands with Huston, Pearson rode Bargain Lass to victory at Hollywood Park. He drove immediately to Huston’s home to collect his reward, but the director beat him to the house. Huston grabbed all the pre-Columbian figures from the floor that he could hold and disappeared to the bedroom. “Oh no you don’t,” screamed Pearson. Huston offered to let Pearson take any piece from the other room rather than one from the bunch he was holding, but Pearson insisted on a figure in the director’s hands. After soliciting a promise that the deal was final, Huston gave up the piece, only to return to the adjoining room, where his most prized figures lay. The sly deceit was a typical Huston ruse and the first of countless practical jokes that laid the foundation of their friendship.

“They were Mutt and Jeff,” Lauren Bacall has said. Or, as Huston’s Oscar-winning daughter, Anjelica, now describes them: “My father was sort of Don Quixote to Billy’s Sancho Panza.” Another acquaintance of both men observes, “People used to say that Billy was John Huston’s goat, the way a racehorse has a goat in the stalls to keep them calm. Because John was such a wild man.”

Billy Pearson and John Huston share a candid moment. By M. Bertrand/from Never Look Back.

When Huston relocated to Paris in 1952 to shoot Moulin Rouge, he invited Pearson to join him, making introductions within the French racing scene. Huston fell in with a group of expats who became his regular drinking companions at Alexandre’s on Rue George V: the writers Art Buchwald, Peter Viertel, and Irwin Shaw; legendary war photographer Robert Capa; and Ukrainian director Anatole Litvak, whose Decision Before Dawn had earned an Academy Award nomination for best picture the previous year. Pearson quickly found his niche in this gang. Buchwald, who covered the Paris scene at the time for the New York Herald Tribune, recalled to Vanity Fair before his death, in 2007, “We got dinner on our own, and then we’d all sort of gather at Alexandre’s and stay up until two or three in the morning. Billy was funny and he was our jockey.”

Huston’s son Tony speaks for many when he delineates Pearson’s role in his father’s merry band. “The nature of a court is that you have jesters. And Billy was a first-rate jester,” he says. But Gene Kelly’s daughter Kerry Kelly Novick remembers Pearson as something more. “My father was an athlete of his kind, and he had a lot of respect for Billy’s skills and strengths and canniness,” she recalls. “He was something of a curiosity—a jockey who was interested in art.”

According to Buchwald, at Paris’s Longchamp racetrack, Pearson once pulled back on a very good horse so that the odds would be long against him when the horse was later entered in a race in London. Tipped off by Pearson, Buchwald and others made the trip to England to bet on the race, in which Pearson let the horse run freely. Recalled Buchwald: “Gene Kelly and myself and Irwin Shaw, we all went over there. The horse just walked away with it and we all had our winnings.” Pearson took his own earnings and headed with Huston to Sulka’s for an extravagant new wardrobe.

In one notorious incident during their Paris days, Pearson and Huston retreated to a casino in Deauville shortly after viewing a Monet painting for sale from a private collection. Huston was broke and couldn’t come up with the $10,000 asking price. Coincidentally, producer Mike Todd happened to be at the same casino and lent Huston $1,000, which he proceeded to run up to more than half a million dollars in an astonishing series of lucky bets. But Huston lost everything on the next bet, except for $10,000 that the casino hadn’t been able to cover. With a smile, Huston turned to Pearson and said, “Well, kid, we won the Monet.”

Another night, after Pearson had won the French Oaks, the first race of France’s Triple Crown, the two men picked up some prostitutes near Montmartre and brought them back to their suite at the Lancaster Hotel. As Huston distracted the hotel clerks, Pearson snuck the women upstairs. Pearson had $3,000 in cash, he told Huston biographer Lawrence Grobel later, but with six girls in the room “you can’t just hold $3,000 in your hands while you’re trying to fuck them. So John said he’d hide the money where they couldn’t find it. And he hid it so well we never found it.” In Pearson’s telling of the story, he and Huston ended up paying the young women with furniture from the room, which then had to be smuggled out of the hotel along with the girls.

But Pearson and Huston’s friendship wasn’t simply parlor-table antics and gags. After returning to Los Angeles, Pearson wrote the director in July 1952: “I want to tell you how swell it was to get your note. Even though it was a little short, just to know that with all of your work you still think of me. (This sounds like a broad talking) but it is true just the same.” In Viertel’s roman à clef, White Hunter, Black Heart, about the making of Huston’s The African Queen (for which Viertel completed an uncredited revision), he writes explicitly about the director’s friendship with Pearson. “I was in Paris, and Paris was a beautiful dream, just made for love,” says Huston’s alter ego in the novel, a film director named John Wilson. “The object of my affection then was a jockey.” Wilson observes that the jockey—whom Viertel called “Jackie” in the book and confirmed to Vanity Fair before his death was based on Pearson—was “not much to look at,” but then “they’d lift him on a horse and love would start to sing.… Win or lose I’d wind up with my heart in my mouth, just to see Jackie out there.”

If their written language had the tone of lovers, so did their quarrels. During a trip to Italy to look at art and architecture in 1953, they stopped for a meal one day. Getting back into the car, the men mused on what art objects they would choose if they had their pick of any in the world. Going first, Huston chose the Louvre’s La Pietà d’Avignon. “I fucking near drove the car right off the road,” Pearson told Grobel. The painting was his favorite and Huston knew it. Pearson then chose Huston’s favorite, Rembrandt’s Night Watch. “You fucker,” replied Huston. “You never liked that painting when you saw it. It’s mine!” Pearson smiled until Huston then took Pearson’s second-favorite work, the Assyrian Lion Hunt from the British Museum, for his next pick. “I threw his bag out of the car and yelled, ‘This is my fucking car, get out, sonofabitch!” The two men didn’t see each other again for a year.

While Pearson won more than 300 races up and down the West Coast between 1949 and 1954, earning him a purse of almost $1.3 million, his extracurricular passions were taking him away from the world of racing. He showed up at Hollywood Park one day dressed in his fancy Savile Row wardrobe. “He had jodhpurs and a vest on, with a hat and a cane,” recalls Bob Benoit, a onetime racetrack publicist. “We took some pictures of him trying to get into the jocks’ room. They were joking around, pretending not to let him in because he didn’t look like an American jockey.” The truth was that it was a young man’s sport, and Pearson, at 36, was fast approaching the age at which most jockeys hung up their saddle. “Kid,” said the 14-years-older Huston after the two reconciled, “you haven’t met your true destiny yet. You’re not going to spend the rest of your life on a horse’s behind.”

Pearson and his wife Queta display some of their primitive and pre-Columbian art in their Pasadena, California, home, March 1952. From A.P. Photos.

Pearson’s destiny lay along the road he’d traveled out of Mexico a decade earlier, paved with antiquities and decorative objects. Soon after his terrible accident in 1941, he’d found a quilt on McAllister Street in San Francisco depicting Philadelphia’s Independence Hall. Pearson paid $8 for it, but later found it was worth $2,000. Intrigued, he purchased more than 100 other quilts, but the whole lot turned out to be barely worth $10. What started as an obsessive determination to explain to himself how quilts that looked so similar could have widely different value evolved into a lifelong obsession. “I began studying the design, the needlework, the stitches, and became an expert,” Pearson said later. The art dealers who knew Pearson are quick to point out that his efforts at self-education were largely besides the point, for the thing he would need most to succeed could not be taught. He had been blessed with a talent as rare and requisite to the challenge of dealing in art as his size and canniness had been to the challenge of racing horses: he had an eye.

The Treasures of Tierra Blanca

Indeed Pearson’s eye, to say nothing of the unusual fact of his knowledge of art as a jockey, made him a natural choice for The $64,000 Question. The show that made national celebrities out of ordinary Americans like Gloria Lockerman, the 12-year-old black spelling whiz from Baltimore, and Gino Prato, the opera-loving shoemaker, brought Billy Pearson to the attention of America in the span of a few short weeks in the spring of 1956. His successful appearances on The $64,000 Question and its spin-off, The $64,000 Challenge, made him a wealthy man. (His quiz-show earnings from 1956 totaled nearly $180,000—a value of more than $1 million today.) In addition to the Edward Hicks painting, Pearson bought cars and speedboats, diving helmets and Geiger counters. He took a thick wad to Vegas, gambled it away, and used the remainder to open a gallery in the La Jolla section of San Diego. Within a year, he was broke. In a 1959 profile for Parade magazine, “How I Squandered a Million Dollars,” Pearson declared, “Money was meant to be spent.” His bank statement at the time—despite the healthy sum he’d earned from racing—showed a balance of $2.71. “I’m reconciled to the fact that I will never get out of this life alive,” said Pearson, “and while I’m still breathing, I’m going to live it up.”

The cover of the January 1959 issue of Parade magazine, which featured Pearson and the article “How I Squandered a Million Dollars.”

Eager to find more pre-Columbian treasure to keep his gallery afloat, in the summer of 1959 Pearson accompanied Huston down to Veracruz, Mexico, where Huston had been hired by actor Burt Lancaster to direct The Unforgiven. Several weeks into the shoot, Pearson called his friend excitedly from Mexico City. Near the town of Tierra Blanca, he said, he had discovered a trove of antiquities, including three exquisite life-size figures. Huston sent his valet to an apartment building where Pearson claimed to be hiding out with the loot from some men who had followed him. Pearson hid the statues in the valet’s Chrysler. In Pearson’s telling, the bandits were on them as soon as the car emerged from the apartment’s garage, and gunshots were fired as the car swerved wildly, trying to dodge the bullets and lose the men, which it finally did.

Things seemed almost as fraught on the set of The Unforgiven. A pregnant Audrey Hepburn had been thrown by a horse, leading her husband, Mel Ferrer, to fly down to the set to keep an eye on the renegade director. Huston had other eyes on him, too, the most important pair belonging to Lancaster, who began questioning the director’s judgment and second-guessing where the camera should be placed. Huston didn’t appreciate the unsolicited advice. At Pearson’s prodding, he borrowed a plane belonging to his actor Audie Murphy and instructed the pilot to fly above a golf tournament that Lancaster was playing in. Pearson and Huston dropped thousands of ping-pong balls out of the plane onto the golf course. On each ball had been written an insult: “Burt Lancaster sucks” or “Yankee sons of bitches, go home!” It became impossible to distinguish the real golf balls from the ping-pong balls, and the tournament had to be cancelled.

When Pearson returned from Mexico City with the statues, Huston was immediately struck by their beauty. The three seated figures were sculpted of red clay and depicted bare save for ceremonial necklaces and loincloths. Two sat cross-legged and the third with its knees bent upwards. Their relative size and degree of intactness marked them as being quite valuable. Once the pieces had been safely smuggled across the border, they were split by Pearson, Huston, and Ted Weiner, a Texas oilman and art collector who had helped Pearson to bankroll the dig.

By this time Pearson determined that dealing art in San Diego would not be profitable. In 1960, he made the tough decision to leave Queta and their two young daughters and move alone to San Francisco, where he opened a gallery of primitive art below his apartment on Union Street in Pacific Heights. Pearson quickly fell in with a new crowd of literary, entertainment, and society figures, who proved important to his business. Unlike Huston’s salon of expats in Paris, who had embraced Pearson as “their jockey,” this group looked to him as a peer. It included Herb Caen; actor Sterling Hayden; Barnaby Conrad, whose book Matador had been optioned by Huston, and who ran a famous nightclub of the same name; and Enrico Banducci, whose Hungry i club had brought young entertainers like Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, and Barbra Streisand to the attention of America.

The living room of St. Clerans, John Huston’s home in Ireland, photographed for the December 1964 issue of House & Garden. One of the Veracruz sculptures is visible in the bookshelf. By Pedro E. Guerrero/courtesy of the Condé Nast Archive.

After John Huston lost much of his pre-Columbian art over a coin toss during his divorce from Evelyn Keyes, Pearson helped his friend rebuild his collection. He soon facilitated the sale of the last of the three Veracruz statues, still owned by Ted Weiner, to Huston. (Pearson had sold his own statue to the director years earlier for $20,000.) Huston gave them a position of prominence at his Ireland estate, St. Clerans. His children Tony, Danny, and Anjelica today remember the significance of the statues. “They were extremely important,” says Tony, “and Dad had spent big money to acquire them.”

Dealing Days

During this period, Pearson met singer Andy Williams while skiing in Sun Valley, Idaho. Williams had shot to stardom with his recording of “Moon River” in 1961. The success of that single led to a nine-year television series, The Andy Williams Show, and a gig headlining at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas that would run for two decades. Shortly after their encounter on the Idaho slopes, Pearson accompanied Williams on his singing tours, from Europe to Australia and Japan.

By this time, Pearson’s connoisseurship had evolved considerably. The 1972 unesco treaty protecting cultural heritage put an end to widespread importation of pre-Columbian art into the United States from Mexico, and effectively curbed that part of Pearson’s business. Undeterred, he shifted his focus to other areas of primitive art—Native American, Oceanic, and African—as well as his great passion, American folk art. Pearson’s eclectic collecting method owed more to his personal taste or hunches than to rigorous academic or ethnographic standards. New Mexican dealer Will Channing was struck by the former jockey’s deep curiosity about the pieces he dealt in. “You’d have these great dialogues about art, about objects, and about culture,” says Channing. “It wasn’t just about, ‘I’m buying this for $300 and selling it for $500.’ It was: ‘Can you imagine what kind of people actually used this?’ He’d buy something that he didn’t know anything about and learn about it. Sometimes he’d make a mistake and sometimes he would score.”

Once, Pearson was so certain that he’d found a minor masterpiece, by the American folk artist Sheldon Peck, that he convinced Williams to split the cost of the $12,000 painting. Williams complied, but when he saw the stylized painting of a woman and her granddaughter, he wanted nothing to do with it. He was thrilled when his pal was subsequently able to sell the painting to the noted dealer Peter Tillou for $35,000—a price Williams found ridiculous given the corny subject matter. But Pearson’s gut feeling proved correct. The painting, Anna Gould Crane and Granddaughter Jennette, was later sold by Tillou for a price in the high six figures, and it now sits in the American Folk Art Museum.

The three controversial Veracruz sculptures.

Following his instincts led Pearson to a fascinating range of objects in his most productive years as a dealer, from 1965 to 1985. The early quilts and the Edward Hicks painting were augmented over time by a wide variety of pieces, from prisoner art and weathervanes to mystery clocks and a rare 19th-century jockey figurehead that was valued at more than $100,000. In the late 1960s, he became intrigued with miniature steam locomotives and bought several in London to sell at his gallery in San Francisco. “They’re Tiffany watches on wheels,” Pearson told a reporter. An 18th-century birdhouse carved in the shape of George Washington’s head became the signature piece of his collection. “It’s magic,” Pearson later told Architectural Digest. “The rarest piece I have ever found … It’s priceless, but I’d never sell it. It would be like selling my soul.”

Pearson’s passion for the material he collected inspired others. “Billy was a very seminal guy,” recalls Gary Spratt, a fellow dealer who once shared gallery space with Pearson. “If it wasn’t for him, I would say a dozen or so [dealers] wouldn’t even be in the business.” If you entered Pearson’s shop and showed a genuine interest in something, he would become quite animated, eager to share his knowledge. But Pearson disdained a certain breed of skeptical academic collector with such intensity that he often kept his shop locked, and one might walk by and see the store empty, with Pearson seated, reading a book. “He sat in a little chair in back of this really great Mexican Colonial desk,” adds Spratt. “His feet would always be up on the rung of the chair like he was riding, you know, in the jockey position.”

In truth, Pearson attracted a clientele who came in large part to hear his entertaining stories of adventures with his famous friends. Such stories abounded. When Andy Williams was once living in London for six weeks, Pearson flew over to join him. Williams recalls Pearson tipping him off to a wine dealer he knew through Huston and suggesting that he let him order the beverages for the entertaining they had planned to do while in town. “The next day,” says Williams with a laugh, “a truck came. Billy had spent £6,000 of my money. I said, ‘Billy, this is getting to be ridiculous. What are we gonna do with all of this stuff?’ He’d bought all kinds of champagnes. Cases and cases of Dom Perignon, Monte Blanc, red wines, and white wines. It filled up a room.”

They were eating dinner at an Italian restaurant one evening and Pearson started goofing around with the other diners for laughs. At three in the morning, when he had 12 people playing shuffleboard with dinner rolls, Williams suddenly recognized Peter Sellers in the room. “Sellers came over to me and said, ‘Who is that guy?’” recalls the singer. “I said, ‘That’s Billy Pearson. He’s a good friend of mine.’ He said, ‘My God, he is really funny. He’s interesting.’” Williams says he invited Sellers and his party over to the hotel where he was staying with Pearson. “They all came over and we opened champagne,” Williams remembers. And so it went. In four weeks, they ran through the entire supply of booze that Pearson had bought.

Pearson’s charisma also masked a much darker side. He stopped speaking to Williams for more than a year after a silly argument concerning one of Williams’s girlfriends. And while Pearson’s fifth wife, interior designer Myra Hoefer, credits Pearson with helping her develop a more sophisticated aesthetic, she says life with the former jockey was filled with “lots of fits, making demands and throwing clothes out the window, telling you you had to leave because you were worthless. He was really a little Napoleon.” Adds Pearson’s third wife, Queta, “For a great many years, he forbid me to have children.” She finally got the best of her husband, she claims, when Ricki Soma, the mother of Anjelica and Tony Huston, poked so many holes in her diaphragm that “there was hardly a diaphragm left.”

Fool for Love

In 1983, Pearson was sitting in the Tosca Café, the famous watering hole across from City Lights bookstore in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood, when playwright Sam Shepard approached him. Shepard had been cast in The Right Stuff, the film adaptation of Tom Wolfe’s dissection of the early days of the American space program, which would earn him an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor. They were shooting in the area, and when he was not working on the film, Shepard was hard at work on a new play, Fool for Love, which dealt with an impossible but all-consuming romantic affair between two half-siblings at a Mojave Desert motel.

Recalls Tosca owner Jeannette Etheredge, “Sam and I were talking and I said, ‘If you want to talk to somebody about women, there’s a guy you should meet. He’s a jockey. And he’s been married I don’t know how many times.’” Shepard immediately fell under Pearson’s spell. “I spent a lot of time with Billy when we were doing The Right Stuff,” recalls the playwright. “He was great fun to hang out with and to drink with, and he was a good buddy. He once rode a horse called Citation, which was one of the great horses of all time. And that always kind of enamored me towards him. One drunken night we were talking about the usual cataclysm surrounding women. He said something brilliant and I decided to dedicate the play to him.”

Shepard had a ranch in Sonoma near Pearson’s home. “Billy was an amazingly generous guy,” he remembers. “You’d go into his place, and he had all of this stuff all around, on the walls and everywhere, and you’d sort of admire a little piece of work, and he’d just take it off the wall and give it to you.” That is how Shepard found himself with a small, beautiful ivory sculpture of a horse and an etching dating back to the gold rush.

“I just loved listening to his stories and all his sagas, which were unbelievable,” says Shepard. “You know, finding all these amazing works of art all over the world and smuggling them out of the country, and his philandering with John. He was just an amazing man.” Shepard remarks, with not a little respect, “He actually did all the shit that people would like to believe they did, you know?” From the grave, John Huston might kid Shepard for his credulity. “Billy’s accounts of our experiences together are infinitely better than what really happened,” Huston once wrote. “They always contain a seed of truth, but sometimes I have difficulty in discovering it.” Indeed, there is no evidence to suggest that Pearson ever rode the Triple Crown winner Citation.

John Huston’s The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, the only picture in which he cast Pearson, captures the spirit of the animated jockey turned collector in the film’s opening-credit scrawl, which concludes with the words, “Maybe this isn’t the way it was … it’s the way it should have been.” The greatest Billy Pearson story that never was involves the three life-size seated statues unearthed during the shooting of The Unforgiven, back in 1959.

Forced to sell St. Clerans in the early 70s because he could no longer afford its upkeep, Huston liquidated much of his art. He sold the three Veracruz pieces to a Texas collector, who in turn sold them to the Dallas Museum of Art, where they were displayed prominently from 1976 until 1987, when Connoisseur magazine revealed that several major works of pre-Columbian art were actually fakes made by sculptor Brigído Lara, in Veracruz, Mexico. Among the pieces whose authenticity was questioned were works at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the St. Louis Museum of Art, and the Dallas Museum of Art, including the three pieces formerly belonging to John Huston.

Harry Parker III, then the director of the D.M.A., had worked under Connoisseur editor-in-chief Thomas Hoving when he had been director of the Met. “Once the article was scheduled,” recalls Parker, “Tom called me in Dallas and said, ‘We’re going to unveil your three Veracruz ceramic figures as fake, and you have three weeks to respond either by denying it or by confirming it.’” Parker and his curator of pre-Columbian art, Carol Robbins, flew down to Jalapa, Mexico, to meet Lara. Impressed by his story and abilities, they returned convinced the three pieces were indeed modern, and, therefore, forgeries.

However, Pearson had a super-8 film of the excavation that he claimed to have shot when he unearthed the Veracruz statues, and he offered to send the footage. But when Robbins and her colleagues looked at it, the excavation appeared to have been staged—a conclusion supported by archaeologist Jeffrey Wilkerson, director of the Institute for Cultural Ecology of the Tropics, who has worked in Veracruz for more than 40 years and reviewed the film for Vanity Fair. Wilkerson notes that, while the objects are purportedly from Tierra Blanca in the lowlands, the film shows terrain inconsistent with that area. Wilkerson found the shallow depth at which the objects were discovered (one to two feet for most pieces) and their layout in the earth highly suspicious. The film, he concluded, was a hoax.

Lawrence Grobel, at work on The Hustons when the Connoisseur story hit, shared the news with the frail director, who was suffering from the ravages of emphysema. Huston must have been dispirited to know that—like the black bird sought by Humphrey Bogart and assorted schemers in his directorial debut, The Maltese Falcon—the stuff of his own dreams was nothing more than a cartload of worthless pottery peddled by his old friend Billy Pearson. “He didn’t want to talk about it,” says Grobel today. “There was something there that was forever and ever embarrassing and humiliating.… We weren’t talking about pieces of art; we were talking about a friendship, and a friend doesn’t do this to a friend.” According to Grobel, when he confronted Pearson about the Veracruz pieces, “Billy said, ‘It’s not going to do us any good [to talk about it].’ I felt that he might have got caught with his hand in the cookie jar.”

Three months after the Veracruz revelations, John Huston died. Pearson was the only non–family member at the funeral, held at the Hollywood Memorial Park cemetery. The director was laid out in a white track suit before a gathering of 25 people. Anjelica Huston recalls, “You can imagine, it was a devastating affair for all of us. Then Billy stood up and said, ‘I’m not going to talk for long, but John, you have got so much makeup on. You’ve got to get out of here and get that stuff off of your face.’ As usual, Billy kind of broke the sobriety of the moment.”

After a lifetime of smoking, Pearson was himself diagnosed with emphysema, in 1993. Following the death of his friend Huston, he had exiled himself to Europe, where he collected “trench art”—trinkets fashioned from spent artillery shells by soldiers hunkered down in the European trenches during World War I. Returning to the States with his sixth wife, Maggie, and their daughter, Cody, Pearson settled in Kingston, New York. Due to his illness, his ability to conduct his business became more limited, and he grew increasingly willing to sell off prized pieces from his collections to stay afloat. He put up a good portion of his extensive Americana collection in 1994, including the one-of-a-kind jockey figurehead and his treasured George Washington birdhouse, which he had vowed never to sell.

Pearson slowly weakened to the point that he required a wheelchair and, in time, an oxygen tank. In between inhalations of oxygen, he’d take the mask off and light a cigarette. As his death approached and he entered the hospital, his family decided to ease his passing by turning the room into a place of celebration, a tamer version of the “Den of Iniquity” into which Pearson had turned his hospital room years earlier when he first picked up a book on antiques.

Andy Williams was at home on the evening of November 28, 2002, when the phone rang. “Maggie called me right when he was about to go off life support,” says Williams. “He was having his one drink a night. They were playing music that he loved and all of his children were around him, and I said good-bye to him and he said good-bye to me, and he died a few minutes later. But that’s the way to go. I mean, have the things around you that you love. And to laugh and cheer and drink champagne.”

The Tale That Wagged the Dig

Upon returning to California after The Unforgiven shoot in Veracruz, Pearson phoned the actress Betsy Blair one day and asked her to meet him at the Cock and Bull, an English pub on Sunset Boulevard. Blair, an Oscar nominee for Paddy Chayevsky’s Marty, had come to know Pearson when she was married to Gene Kelly. When she arrived with her best friend, actress Ruth Conte, Pearson ushered them to a private room in the back of the restaurant. “There was just the three of us and a waiter or two,” recalls Blair, now 85. “He got a white sheet and hung it from the bar and he showed us this film on it. And it was of a dig in Mexico, and bringing out the things, beautiful things. The thing about this one evening that made it important was that it was real. You knew that it happened.”

And yet it hadn’t. For Blair and Conte, Pearson clearly relished the opportunity to “prove” a great story. Indeed, the tale that wagged the dig speaks to his enduring mystique. A picture of Pearson taken for the catalogue of a Fort Worth exhibition of pre-Columbian objects owned by Pearson’s old partner Ted Weiner, which included two of the three Veracruz statues that later went to Huston, shows Pearson sitting on a bar in Weiner’s home between the pieces in a “speak no evil” pose. The photo is full of mischief. In his suit and waistcoat, with his agreeably mute pre-Columbian pals, Pearson appears the consummate self-made gentleman scoundrel. The picture captures the passion of the collector, the P.R. savvy of the dealer, and the wink-wink smirk of the naughty prankster.

Friends like Huston and Andy Williams appear to have willingly put up with Pearson’s excesses in order to gain access to his outsize personality, his fierce intelligence and lack of pretense, and his instincts for what constituted good and bad art. “Dad, I think, had a pretty accurate appraisal of Billy,” says Tony Huston. “Dad’s great fear in life was of being bored. He detested anybody or any situation that might be boring, and Billy was a great antidote to boredom. But he came with a price tag.”

That price tag went both ways, of course. The obligation to play the role of “Billy Pearson” could be a burden. Gary Spratt recalls swimming with Pearson in the pool of Pearson’s Healdsburg home, outside San Francisco, one day in the mid-1980s. “We were drinking beer and smoking cigarettes and laying in the pool. And Billy said, ‘You know, Gary, I can talk to you. I don’t have to be on all the time with you.’ … And then he could turn around and completely ignore me if someone important would come along. Billy was the main character in his own movie. He could not stop being a showman.”

Mentor to a generation of younger dealers, Pearson impressed all who met him with his wit, his passion for the great find, and, perhaps most of all, his delight in a well-told tale. Lawrence Grobel recalls a discussion he had with Huston about Pearson’s fantastic story of the Monet painting that the director bought in Deauville in 1952. All the elements—from the presence of Mike Todd with funds to lend, to the precise amount of money Huston had remaining after losing nearly all his winnings from an extraordinary gambling run—were so typical of the exaggeration that made Pearson’s stories so irresistibly good and so difficult to trust. “Billy told me that story with great enthusiasm,” says Grobel, “and so I checked it out with John. I said, ‘John, was it really that much?’ John Huston laughed, and then he looked at me and said, ‘Tell it Billy’s way.’”

Nat Moss is a screenwriter whose work includes the independent feature films Washington Heights and Adrift in Manhattan.